The Days of the French Revolution

by Christopher Hibbert

  The King now comforted himself with the thought that the trouble was over. He sent the Gardes du Corps and the Flanders Regiment, which had been ordered to march to the palace, back to their barracks. But soon after nine o’clock he learned that he must shortly expect other visitors at Versailles. For in Paris hundreds of men of the National Guard had converged upon the Hôtel de Ville demanding to be led to Versailles. Their commander, Lafayette, had been reluctant to take them there. He had sat on horseback by the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, attempting to pacify them. But they refused to listen to him, going so far, as he afterwards said, to threaten to hang him from the lampost on which Foullon de Doué had been murdered unless he agreed to their demands. So, at length, the Commune gave him instructions to march off with the Guard, ordering two delegates to accompany him and to ask the King to return to Paris.

  Spattered with mud, Lafayette arrived at Versailles with these delegates, and some 20,000 National Guardsmen and other armed civilians, at about eleven o’clock. Advised once again to flee by his Ministers and the Queen, and this time also by Mounier, the King at first agreed to do so. But after some Ministers had already left the palace and were rattling along with their families in coaches on the road to Rambouillet, he changed his mind following a conversation with Necker: he would stay behind after all and see what Lafayette had to say. He greeted him courteously, accepted without demur the arrival of the National Guard, agreed to approve the Assembly’s decrees and the Declaration of Rights. He listened politely while the Commune’s delegates made their request for his return to Paris and, while he did not immediately commit himself to this, he seemed willing to consider it.

  It was now two o’clock in the morning. The crisis appeared to be past. All was quiet. An officer, looking down into the courtyard from the Aile des Ministres, could see no movement. The women had gone away to find places of shelter from the still-pouring rain; many of them had taken off their skirts and petticoats to wring out the water, shocking an officer who complained that ‘the scenes which took place amongst them were anything but decent’.

  Assured by Lafayette that he and his family would come to no harm, the King went to bed. So did the Queen who was suddenly awakened at dawn by the noise of trampling feet and by loud shouts on the staircase that led up to her apartments: ‘Death to the Austrian! Where is she? Where is the whore? We’ll wring her neck! We’ll tear her heart out! We’ll fry her liver and that won’t be the end of it.’ ‘I’ll have her thighs!’ cried one. ‘And I’ll have her entrails,’ called others. ‘I’ll have her kidneys in a fricassee!’

  A gate leading into the Cour des Princes had been left unlocked. A horde of armed women had pushed it open and had poured into the courtyard led by Nicholas Jourdan, a savage-looking, bearded model from the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, whose arms were naked to the elbow and whose hands and blue overcoat were already smeared with blood. As the crowd had approached the palace one of the Gardes du Corps had opened fire from a window, hitting a young journeyman cabinet-maker who had fallen dead in the courtyard. Enraged by this, the crowd had rushed forward, and Jourdan, brandishing an axe, had attacked one of the other Guards and cut his head off. A second Guard had also been decapitated as Jourdan and the women had rushed across the Cour des Princes into the Cour Royale and, shouting for the ‘Austrian whore’, had started to mount the staircase.

  An officer attempting to bar their way, the blood pouring down his face, called out ‘Save the Queen!’ through the anteroom door. ‘Save the Queen! They are going to kill her.’ As he was knocked down with the butt of a musket wielded with such force that the trigger penetrated his skull, the Queen, who had leapt out of bed, put on a shift and petticoat, picked up a pair of stockings and was about to put those on as well when two of her ladies dashed into her room and urged her not to trouble to dress but to make for the King’s apartments before the mob broke down the door. So, with her stockings in her hand and a cape round her shoulders, she and her ladies rushed through the Petits Cabinets, locking the doors behind them, towards the Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf. As they ran, the mob behind them battered down the bedroom door, poured into the room, and finding the bed empty, slashed at the sheets with their axes and swords.

  The door leading into the King’s apartments was locked on the inside. The Queen and her ladies battered on it, screaming for help. At length it was opened by a frightened valet. The King was not there: at the sound of the tumult he had hurried off through a secret passage to the Queen’s room, and seeing that she had escaped, he had gone to fetch the Dauphin. He suddenly appeared with the boy in his arms.

  By now Lafayette, who had gone to bed at the Hôtel de Noailles, had been roused from his sleep and had galloped over to the palace where the National Guard had succeeded in stopping the fighting and had cleared the mob out of the building. But the courtyards were still full of shouting demonstrators, firing their muskets in the air, parading the severed heads of the royal guards on pikestaffs and crying out, ‘Le Roi à Paris! Le Roi à Paris!’ According to the Marquis de Ferrières-Marsay, the Duc d’Orléans ‘was walking cheerfully about among them, in a grey frock-coat and a round hat with a riding whip in his hand. He smiled at some and talked in a carefree manner to others. All around him the air resounded with shouts of “Our father is with us! Long live King Orléans”…At the same time…men dressed as women were spreading word among the crowd that M. de Lafayette was a traitor and that they must get rid of him. One of the leaders…was advising a group of men and women who thronged round him and to whom he was handing money, “We want the heads of both the Queen and M. de La Fayette. That man is a traitor. He left Paris against his will and very late in the day.” At these words a man with a hideous face disguised as a woman displayed a kind of sickle and swore that he would be the one to cut off the bitch’s head…Troops of women and men armed with pikes and muskets were everywhere hunting the men of the Bodyguard…The barbarous horde manifested a savage pleasure, some of them bathing their hands in the blood [of the dead Guards] and wiping it over their faces, others dancing round the bodies…’ Everywhere there were calls for the King to go to Paris and threats to Lafayette.

  Another less partisan informant, Elizabeth Girard, a ‘bourgeoise de Paris’, who later gave evidence before an official inquiry, confirmed that ‘all the people, without distinction, especially the journeymen locksmiths who were there in great numbers, were saying that they had lost a day’s wages, that if the King didn’t come to Paris, and if the Bodyguard were not killed, Lafayette’s head should be stuck on the end of a pike.’ And Claude Fournier, an officer of the National Guard and well-known agitator, claimed that he had called to the fishwives, using the kind of language that they would have used themselves, ‘Sacrées bitches, can’t you see that you are being buggered about by the King and Lafayette…The whole damned lot will have to be taken to Paris.’

  Eventually Lafayette himself expressed the opinion that order could never be restored until the royal family showed themselves to the people. So the King went out on to the balcony. There were a few scattered cheers but these were almost drowned by shouts of ‘The Queen! The Queen!’

  Marie Antoinette had recovered her composure. Her children’s governess said that she appeared, indeed, quite unmoved by her ordeal: ‘Her countenance was sad but calm.’ Wearing a dressing-gown of yellow and white stripes, her hair disordered, she came out on to the balcony, her four-year-old son on one side, her daughter, now eleven, on the other, holding their hands. ‘No children! No children!’ the crowd below shouted up at her. So she turned and bent down to help the children back through the window before facing the mob once again, her head erect, unflinching as several muskets were levelled at her. For two minutes she stood there as the mood of the women changed from hostility to grudging respect. Gradually, one after the other, the muskets were lowered. A few women even cried out ‘Vive la Reine!’ but these, so Jeanne Martin said, were silenced by ‘the common people…who hit them to make them quiet
’. The Queen turned away and went back into the palace.

  She did not conceal the fright she had had [theMarquis de Paroy told his wife]. She sighed wearily and, taking the little Dauphin into her arms again, she covered him with kisses and began to cry. This made us all cry, too. Then the Queen went back with the King into the inner cabinet room where I followed them. We were hoping that the danger had passed…But numerous shouts were still heard, ‘The King to Paris! The King to Paris! The King on the balcony!’…The shouts of the populace grew louder and louder. The King consulted with his Ministers for a few minutes. Then he came on to the balcony again, preceded by M. de La Fayette and followed by the Queen, who said, passing in front of me, ‘We are going to Paris.’ For a reply I raised my eyes to heaven.

  ‘My friends,’ the King announced from the balcony, his words greeted by repeated cheers, ‘I will go to Paris with my wife and children.’

  That afternoon the King and Queen, their two children and the governess, climbed into the royal carriage with Monsieur and the King’s sister, Elisabeth. The carriage was surrounded by women waving banners and flags, branches bedecked with coloured ribbons and loaves of bread impaled on the points of bayonets. Several were drunk, some threatening to soak the Queen’s hands in the entrails of the Household Guards, others dancing in the mud, singing songs, jumping on to the backs of soldiers, knocking off their caps and bearskins and putting them on themselves, a few sitting astride the guns and horses of the National Guard, waiting for the disorderly procession to move off.

  The National Guard led the way, escorting wagon-loads of wheat and flour. Then came a regiment of Grenadiers, followed by the disarmed Gardes du Corps and the Flanders Regiment. The royal carriage came next, Lafayette, riding beside it; and, rolling along through the mud behind it, trailed a line of carriages bearing a hundred deputies of the National Assembly who were now to transfer their debates from Versailles to Paris, where they were to meet for a fortnight in the great hall of the archdiocese, before moving to the Manège, a riding school near the Tuileries.

  At the rear of the column, and on either side of the wagons of grain, marched the market-women, their decorated branches amidst the gleaming iron of pikes and musket barrels giving the impression, so one observer thought, of ‘a walking forest’. It was still raining, and the roads were ankle-deep in mud, yet they all seemed content, even cheerful. Occasionally they burst into song on the six-and-a-half-hour march, passed ribald jokes down the ragged ranks or danced along, holding out their aprons. They called out to the people who stood to watch them pass by that they were bringing back to Paris the baker, the baker’s wife and ‘le petit mitrorn’, the baker’s boy.

  ‘The Queen sat at the bottom of the coach with the Dauphin on her knees…while some of the blackguards in the rabble were firing their guns over her head,’ recorded the Comte d’Artois’s Scottish gardener, Thomas Blaikie. ‘As I stood by the coach one man fired over the Queen’s head. I told him to desist but he said he would continue.’

  The King and Queen were driven to the Hôtel de Ville, where they were obliged to listen to several speeches, and then to the Tuileries. The comfortless, sparsely furnished rooms echoed to the sound of their footsteps. Half asleep the Dauphin murmured, ‘It’s very ugly here, mother.’

  4

  THE DAYS OF THE FÉDÉRÉS AND THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES

  14–17 July 1790 and 19–26 June 1791

  ‘I would rather be King of Metz

  than continue to be King of France

  at such a time as this’

  LOUIS XVI

  Once established in the Manège where the debates were less disorderly and rowdy than they had been at Versailles, the Assembly settled down to face the problems of reform. The radicals sat on the President’s left, the less numerous conservatives on his right, this disposition providing thereafter, in other countries as well as France, a useful addition to the terminology of politics. Between the Left and the Right there were not many less partisan voices to be heard, for many moderates, protesting against their colleagues’ attitude towards the violent intervention of the mob, decided to withdraw. Mounier, their leader, went home to Dauphiné and, having failed to rouse the people there to support the policies of the monarchiens, took refuge in Switzerland. Lally-Tollendal, unsuccessful on a similar mission, emigrated to England. Those monarchiens who remained in the Assembly, such as the Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre, no longer exercised much influence there, and many conservatives attended the debates irregularly, leaving their benches almost empty after five o’clock when they went away for their evening meal. So, unhampered by powerful conservative protest and encouraged by the excellent harvest of 1789 which, safely gathered in, silenced the disturbing shouts for bread, the reformists in the Assembly were able to push through a variety of measures which would formerly have met with the most steadfast opposition. The title of the King, who was now to rule under the law and not by divine right, was changed from King of France to King of the French; the parlements were declared to be henceforth in abeyance. In sweeping reforms of the judicial system, judges were to be elected by the people and paid by the state, local government was transformed following upon the creation of new provincial assemblies and the abolition of intendants, the landed estates of the Church were nationalized and were offered for sale in exchange for assignats–the celebrated bonds which were to become the currency of the Revolution. This last measure did provoke strong objections both within the Assembly and outside it. It was pointed out that the properties which were to be appropriated had not been given to the Church as a whole but to particular abbeys, colleges, parishes and hospitals for specific purposes; that the country would have to assume the extremely expensive responsibility for both charitable work and education; that it was economically inadvisable to break up large holdings into so great a number of smaller plots; that there would be a huge depreciation in their value, since the market was to be flooded with them at a time of such uncertainty. But the advocates of the measure were undeterred. ‘The assignats will soon be dispersed all over the country,’ argued one of the most persuasive of the radical clergy, Thomas Lindet, a curé soon to be rewarded with a bishopric, ‘and, in spite of himself, every man who holds them will become a defender of the Revolution.’ So, by a very small majority, the annexation of the estates of the Church was approved by the Assembly.

  Although he approved of this particular enactment, Mirabeau rose again and again to condemn the flood of revolutionary measures which, before being debated in the Assembly, were often discussed at meetings of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution. This Society, which met at the convent of the Jacobins in the Rue Saint-Honoré and was to become famous as the Jacobin Club, was already profoundly influential. The more advanced Breton deputies had been among the first to join, and soon nearly all the deputies of the Left attended their meetings. In the formulation of radical opinion its influence spread all over France where the number of similar clubs in the provinces grew month by month until there were over four hundred of them.

  Mirabeau came to some of the meetings in the Rue Saint-Honoré but he was concerned now to contain the Revolution rather than to promote it. ‘When you undertake to run a revolution,’ he said, ‘the difficulty is not to make it go; it is to hold it in check.’ Appalled by the rapidity of its progress, he used all his powers of persuasion and oratory to stem the tide – to release the King from virtual captivity, to reduce the increasing powers of the Assembly and above all to reverse the decree which forbade any deputy from becoming a Minister of the Crown. But, since it was well known that he longed to be a Minister himself, his condemnation of this last decree was naturally supposed to be dictated by self-interest. His great powers were recognized in the Assembly but his motives were suspect there; and, while his usefulness was acknowledged at the Tuileries, he was never fully trusted there either. It was accepted that he was a royalist at heart, but it was a matter of concern that he believed so strongly that the authority of the
Crown should rest on the sovereignty of the people. The King, who abhorred Mirabeau’s reputation as an adulterer, nevertheless undertook to settle his enormous debts and to pay him a generous salary in addition to a very large capital sum if his efforts on the monarchy’s behalf proved successful. These sums were not entirely wasted: by persuasive advocacy in the Assembly, Mirabeau was able to prevent the erosion of certain of the King’s prerogatives and to ensure that he continued to enjoy his limited freedom of movement in spite of calls for his closer confinement. Yet Mirabeau’s championship of the monarchy was more frequently derided than respected, while his advice to the King and Queen, conveyed to the Tuileries in numerous secret messages, was rarely adopted. In the end, the King, disregarding Mirabeau’s urgent warnings, took a step which was to place him beyond the help of his most formidable adviser or, indeed, of anyone else.

  The King was persuaded to take this step largely by the Assembly’s policies towards the Church. The most contentious of these policies had been drafted by one of the specialist committees to which the Assembly delegated certain of its proposed legislation. They were contained in a document misleadingly called the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and involved not only a considerable reduction in the number of bishoprics but also the popular election of both bishops and priests and the severance of those ties which had traditionally bound them to Rome.

  In the hope of averting this schism, the clergy appealed to the Pope to authorize them to accept the Civil Constitution which was passed by the Assembly on 12 July 1790. The Pope hesitated before replying to their request. So the Assembly required them all to take an oath of loyalty to the new Constitution, its own clerical members being ordered to show their brethren a good example. Some of them, led by the radical Abbé Grégoire, did so; but most, including all the bishops who were present, declined to follow their example. Outside the Assembly about half of the lower clergy also refused to take the oath; and only seven bishops accepted it. The Church was thus split into two opposing camps, one aghast at the schism, the other inclined to support the Jansenist lawyer, Armand Gaston Camus, in his answer to the question, ‘What is the Pope?’ ‘The Pope is a bishop, the minister of Jesus Christ, just like any other, whose functions are circumscribed within the limits of the diocese of Rome. It is high time that the Church of France, which has always been jealous of her liberties, should be freed from this servitude.’